the militia types (pandered to by Ron Paul), the talk about Ruby Ridge and Waco, Jesse Helms opining that Clinton had better never appear at any military bases in his state, etc.

yeah, i remember. still seemed more isolated, less desperately unhinged and violent. like what gubke says about "those twins in the simpsons" rings true to me. during the clinton years, the wingnut stuff felt more like a game, the charade of outrage as "business as usual" strategy (and sop to the fringe). during the obama years, the outrage feels more incoherent, panicky and organic, seems to have taken on an independent life of its own.

He and Mom recognize that their support of access to abortion means they're persona non grata in the GOP. Mom, like Betty Ford and Barbara Bush, will say, "I'm conservative; the government has no right to tell me what to do with my body."

there wasn't anywhere near as much foaming "they're destroying america!!!" panic w clinton than there has been with obama.

Oh lord! You just weren't hanging out in the correct places, then. The foaming at the mouth over Clinton was EPIC among the right wing conservatives. Because of my situation and exposure at the time, I saw far more of the Clinton hysteria than I've seen with Obama. Far more.

what were the criticisms? like, why were good conservatives supposed to hate clinton? i remember vince foster and whitewater, of course, but i never got the impression that many people seriously believed that he'd had anyone killed, or that whitewater was any worse than minor-league venality. when the lewinsky business came up, a lot of conservatives got all extra-frothy about clinton's moral turpitude, but the outrage seemed at once personal ("he disgusts me and doesn't deserve to be president") and strategic ("we can use this to take him down").

with obama, it seems as though they consider him a literal enemy of the state, like he's actively and intentionally trying to destroy both america and "the christian religion upon which it was founded". he's not just a bad, undeserving president, he's a hitler-level monster who must be stopped before he institutes godless communist tyranny. or so it seems to me.

If you were over the age of, say, fifteen the Clinton criticism was drip drip drip nonstop for eight years. If there was a break it happened in late '99 and 2000 -- when the right wing said fuck it and concentrated on electing Bush -- so maybe that's what contenderizer means.

nice interview, about a new film, living next door to Lee Kang-sheng & his theatre work, in case anyone's been wondering what he's been upto. he had another film, The Diary of a Young Boy in development for a while that I think's disappeared.

Fred Clark's written about the hyperbolic rightwing Satanazi paranoia on the rise. If you're personally lacking something in your life and need a Great Evil to thrash against and thus prove your persecuted righteousness to your self, you amp up the forces you imagine are aligned against you.

That way, you don't actually have to _do_ anything; you don't have to go out into the world and try to help people or expend any effort at all. Because your enemies are the Forces of Darkness, you're a hero just by taking a moral stand and posting on the internet which is your action against them. You can prove to yourself that you're a good person in the most facile, slack-assed way possible.

Much like so much American rightwing bullshit in the last twenty years, this shit comes from internal psychodrama, not from political belief. Side effect is that mere rational argument and basic facts ain't going to change these people's minds. You can't reason a fellow out of a position Reason never led him into.

I am, unambiguously and without qualification, opposed to burning kittens. I am also confident that you are opposed to this too. And that latter point is why I cannot join the Anti Kitten-Burning Coalition.

The AKBC, again, is on the correct side of this issue. Its members, quite rightly, are vehemently opposed to something to which they ought to be vehemently opposed. But that isn’t what motivates them. What drives them, their central organizing principle, is the notion that they represent a beleaguered and controversial minority view. They imagine that their stance against burning kittens — sweet, adorable, innocent kittens — is something that separates and distinguishes them from most other people. They imagine that their opposition to burning kittens is a brave and exceptional stance that elevates them above most other people.

In other words, the central concern of the Anti Kitten-Burning Coalition is not a defense of kittens, but an accusation against most other people. They are not driven by their opposition to kitten-burning, but by their opposition to a make-believe faction of other people whom they imagine favor kitten-burning. That this vast bloc of pro kitten-burning people cannot be found and does not exist does nothing to dampen their enthusiastic campaign against these supposed monstrously cruel others. It is a delusion, but the AKBC enjoys this delusion.

This delusion gives their lives meaning and purpose. It makes their lives more exciting. And it enables them to bask in the idea that they are good and righteous people — or at least the possibility that they are better than some imagined faction of monstrously cruel other people.

This delusion has become a central defining trait of American politics. Imaginary monsters — other people who are imagined to favor kitten-burning or other monstrous cruelties — are a greater focus of American politics than jobs, taxes, highways and bridges, or environmental protection. Millions of votes are mobilized and cast based on the imaginary fear of an imaginary faction of kitten-burning monsters.

That link is great b/c he goes into four reasons why people(e.g. Santorum & his voters) deliberately choose to believe such horrible things about the real world:

It's all great stuff and I heavily recommend checking it out, if only to lower the compulsion I sometimes feel to bulk-quote it all here as a response to folks wondering why american idiots loudly choose their idiotic stances.

I found out about “Cookiegate” this morning. I was about eight hours late on the dog stuff and, when I asked someone who tweeted about it to explain what they were talking about, they literally didn’t believe that I could possibly be ignorant of such a consequential topic. After I learned the story, I felt a little worse about myself for being in any way involved in the tornado of idiocy that is American politics.

I'm sure there are plenty of such people, but somebody in a (paid) TV ad saying "I'd have a job now, if it wasn't for Mitt Romney" won't likely do much to offset the dissatisfaction of people feeling the pinch who see Obama as having failed them.

Obama's mother "was not only a Communist fellow-traveler," he wrote, "but the sort of 1960s woman who (as we used to say) 'put her body on the line,' first by marrying two Third World men, and then by spending her career in the Third World."

got to love the reasoning that goes from obama praising the social arrangements of poor indonesia as being at least more stable than those of poor chicago, to spengler using it as proof of preferring traditional pre-capitalism to "creative destruction." like, are you really going to argue that a '70s american ghetto is the best billboard for capital?